Several high-profile hate crimes have made headlines in 2009, confirming fears for some that bias attacks are on the rise. They include the April killing of three Pittsburgh policemen by a right-wing extremist and the shooting in June at the Holocaust Museum in Washington by an elderly white supremacist that left a security guard dead.

Read an April 3, 2005, Washington Post article about a variety of efforts and programs to include people with disabilities in congregational life.

In April 2009, the Department of Homeland Security released a report detailing concerns about a rise in right-wing extremism. In The New York Times columnist Charles Blow parses the figures and uses a graphic to illustrate the dependence of right-wing hate groups on recruits with military training.

Listen to an Aug. 2, 2007, Speaking of Faith program about the L’Arche community for the developmentally disabled.

Virginia Trimble is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. She specializes in the history of science, including the history of human understanding of the evolution of galaxies.

Neil J. Cornish is an associate professor of physics at Montana State University in Bozeman. His is an expert on early universe cosmology. His research focuses primarily on Gravitational Wave Astronomy–observing gravitational ways to study different features of the universe.

Gregory Bothun is a physics professor at the University of Oregon in Eugene and author of Cosmology: Mankind’s Grand Investigation.

Yun Wang is an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

Ina Sarcevic is a physics professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson and author of The Edge of Infinity. Read an article she wrote on the fundamental nature of matter.